


Like Healing a Rift in the Universe

by DammitToby



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, Unrequited Love, Unresolved Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-31
Updated: 2013-10-31
Packaged: 2017-12-31 01:36:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1025757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DammitToby/pseuds/DammitToby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leonard McCoy may be a fool, but after Khan, even a fool could see Jim Kirk and Spock were in love. So he files away his feelings for his Captain and graciously fades into the background. Or at least, that's what he planned to do. The Universe, it appears, has other ideas, and it starts, of all places, with Leo saving Spock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Healing a Rift in the Universe

**Author's Note:**

> This is unbeta'd and being posted in two halves out of desperation to make sure I still remember it after NaNoWriMo runs its course.

_For fourteen days Leonard McCoy struggles to hold onto his sanity. Jim is responding to Khan’s blood, but will he live? He has to live. He just has to, because Leo doesn’t think he can live in a world where he can’t be Bones, and Bones was always Jim’s._

_He struggles nightly with the terror that his life is finally over, that, with Jim’s death, there would finally be nowhere left in space for him to go. Earth had ceased to be home the day he could no longer see his daughter, though sometimes he feels that he stopped calling it home even before that, when he walked away from his family home with his father’s blood on his hands._

_But space cannot be and has never been home for Leo, either. Other worlds settled on his skin wrong, and the places in between, the sucking black void that given the chance would steal the soul from his body, was home only to Leo’s nightmares and greatest fears. The only thing that made space safe was Jim leading him on. Jim, his guiding light, his best friend, his heart and soul and hope for a future._

_And now Jim was dead._

_Jim had slipped away from Leo for a second, leaving him cold and alone, with nothing but a name that no longer fit as well as the one Jim had given him and an aching heart._

_The moment passed, and Leo was given one option, one chance to wrench Jim back from Death itself, and he seized it._

_Fourteen days, but it might as well have been fourteen years._

_On the fourteenth day, Spock walks in, and as if on cue, Jim’s eyes open._

_Leo can breathe again. He debates on telling Jim, on finally taking that last step forward and addressing the feelings he’s had since their Academy days. If these past two weeks have shown him anything it’s that he has nothing to lose that he hasn’t given Jim, but then he hears it._

_“You saved my life. Thank you.”_

_Except, Jim wasn’t talking to him. In fact, Jim only had eyes for Spock. And in that moment, Leonard McCoy realizes he’s waited too long. There will be no confessions, because there will be no chance of them. Leo may be Jim’s, but Jim had Spock, and Spock was more than willing from the look of it._

_Leo puts his heart away. “Uhura and I had something to do with it, too, y’know.”_

_But he only partially means it. Let the kids have their love. As long as he could watch over them, he’d be fine._

~

**One Year Later**

~

He lies alone in his quarters, locked away from the daily patter of the ship. Outside of his cocoon of isolation, he can hear Scotty issuing orders, divvying up Engineers into today’s teams for maintenance and tune ups across the Engineering deck, no doubt drawing up his maps of the Jeffries Tubes, all problem areas highlighted with multiple notes tabbed off to the side.

Hendorff was running Security through their drills.

M’Benga had Med Bay bustling around, quieter than if he were there, and about twice as tense.

And on the Bridge, everything was quiet.

Half of this Leo knows. The other half Spock knows.

They are worried, mostly about the silence from the Bridge.

About Jim.

And maybe a little about themselves, but for the most part they do not think about their own situation.

~

Spock fit Leo like a fingerprint, their hearts and souls cracked in ways inversely proportional to one another at the point of contact, and while it could not be said they were a perfect fit, they were flexible enough in the areas of conflict to be able to handle the protrusion with some discomfort.

Still, lying in Leo’s quarters, it was like having an elbow digging into soft flesh: eventually the discomfort became endless, it enveloping their every thought. Yet they knew better than to try to adjust their position. Nothing would give, nothing would shift. They’d simply make themselves more uncomfortably jumbled than they already were.

There simply wasn’t enough room in a single body for two souls.

All they could do was lie there and wait and worry.

~

_It’s too hot {cold} in here._

_{Why do you insist on tossing and turning, Leonard? Even with the blanket it is freezing.}_

_The human body, Spock, has an average {temperature of 37 degrees centigrade, yes I know, Doctor.} Fantastic, then you know I’m technically running a fever?_

_{I am aware.}_

_I just wish this were something I could reduce with an injection, but there is no pathogen-_ Leo stops his internal monologue as an enormous wave of guilt washes over him. Immediately he battles it down with his own anger.

_Stop thinking that. Right now. {It is the truth.}_

_You are not a pathogen._

In a battle of wills, there are very few people who could present a challenge to Spock, but compared to Leonard Horatio McCoy? Spock knew he could not win this time.

~

Leo catalogues his body every now and then when he wants needs to take his mind off of the constant hum of life Spock presented.

They (he) was lying on his Starfleet regulation bed, slightly longer than his body and just wide enough that lying with his palms face down and thumbs just barely brushing his thighs that if he stretched his pinkies out he’d feel the edge of his mattress. He was wearing one black regulation thermal sleeping shirt that could, if necessary, double as his uniform’s undershirt, and a pair of grey standard boxers.

He breathes in through his nose. Air enters his nasal cavity, filtering through the ethmoid sinuses into the nasopharynx, passing the epiglottis and through the larynx down the trachea to fill the lungs.

His lungs expand, expanding the rest of his chest, stretching the smooth-soft polyweave fabric of his thermal shirt.

Spock observes the process as Leo goes over it, the hum of his katra slowing, as if this simple exercise calmed him as well.

~

At first, Spock is everywhere, from the huge unconscious background radiation of daily thought down to the slightest sensation in Leo’s fingertips. Spock’s katra seems to have brushed over Leo’s soul and settled like a cloud of dust, clinging to Leo’s every surface. Like dust, Leo seems to have breathed him in, until even the miles of surface area deep within have collected some bit of Spock.

And while invasive on a scale Leo had never previously known possible (there was absolutely no privacy), he couldn’t help but marvel at just how alive Spock felt in this sense. Before (a time Leo knows is now gone forever), Leo had thought Spock as almost soulless. Robotic, mechanical, highly efficient but lacking the verve he’d always associated with life. Well, maybe not lacking, just refusing to show his capacity except on rare occasion, and even then through a thick veil.

Now Leo can see he was so very wrong, that Spock’s every waking moment was alight and alive with data to be observed and organized. Leo could see now he had so many other venues through which to capture the picture of what was going on around him, on top of senses sharper than Leo’s own. Though he didn’t show it, Spock’s picture of the world wasn’t the highly logical black and white Leo suspected of him, but the same lively picture Leo saw, if not livelier. Just as bright, if not brighter. Full, if not fuller.

Lovely, if not lovelier.

At first Spock had tried to hide this from him, suspecting Leo would only poke fun at him for his “inner beauty” or some other jibe. He was not expecting the humbled wonder the Doctor eventually presented. As such, he did not expect his mental shields to lower between them.

He also did not expect that in becoming closer, the line of distinction between them would not only become more prominent, but also more comfortable.

_{How illogical.} It’s called making friends, Spock._

~

They find out, when they get dressed and leave their room for the first time, that they have been in isolation for five days, meaning it has been six days since the incident in the Omnicrom that lead to their predicament.

The crew greets him cautiously, openly staring and quietly whispering in his presence. They think he is crazy, and he supposes if he saw a man holding silent conversations with himself, he would think him crazy as well.

Leo refuses to go to the Bridge (he can’t stand the pitying looks they give them), Spock refuses to enter Med Bay (his body is there, perfectly healthy except for the loss of cognizance and nerve damage still in need of repair, and seeing your own body from the outside once is once too many). They both agree on avoiding well-populated areas or well-tread hallways.

They end up on Deck 4, Observation Room F, a little used room entirely designed to fill a small flaw in the internal structure, a room that was too small to fit any additional equipment in, too close to the outer hull to install any vital functions, too small to be used as a gathering room, and too out of the way to be convenient to any branch of operation. So one engineer fitted a viewscreen and a line of function-over-comfort seats and created a quiet, forgotten pocket of air where one could watch space as it flew by.

Leo doesn’t know what they’re arguing about this time, probably something to do with the function of boredom in the human kaleidoscope of free emotion, when Jim clears his throat.

Both Leo and Spock whirl around, wondering how long he’d been standing there. Jim’s standing with his shoulders gathered up, posture rigid. Leo catches a flash of curiosity quickly transforming into surprise, before Jim’s guard goes up.

_{What does it mean?}_

_He’s uncertain. He’s looking for something._

_{Me.}_

_Yeah._

“I was beginning to wonder if you’d ever leave your hidey hole.”

“Gotta get up and stretch these bones sometime, Jim. Besides, Spock was getting restless.”

There’s a spark of something in Jim’s eyes, a sharpness to the way he turned his head to look at Leo again. “So he really is in there with you?”

“Yeah.” Leo says cautiously.

_{Why are you concerned, Doctor? Is something wrong?}_

_I think Jim thinks you were dormant and unable to talk._

_{I am not.}_

_Well, I know that, but I don’t think he did, and I don’t think he likes it._

_{Why is that?}_

Leo chuckles, earning him a curious look from Jim that cuts short when something dark blooms in his eyes.

_He’s kind of a possessive brat, Spock._

“You’re not talking about me like I’m not in the room, are you?”

Leo swears he can feel the Vulcan raise an eyebrow. _{Acknowledged and accepted, Doctor.}_

Leo just chuckles again. “Of course not, though the only reason Spock isn’t talking is because we’ve only got one mouth right now.”

“Right.” Jim’s response is cool and clipped, his shoulders relaxing. That’s not good.

_{Why is that?}_

_It just isn’t, Spock._

“Did you want to talk to him, Jim?” Leo asks in the same tone one would sooth a panicked child with.

_{Doctor?}_

_It’s you he’s concerned about._

Something flickers in Jim’s expression. “Can you do that, Bones?”

“I think so.”

_You can do this, right, Spock?_

_{Are you sure, Doctor? This would involve me taking control of your facial muscles and glottis-}_

_Stop stalling and do it, Spock. You’ve been in here long enough to make yourself at home._

Leo doesn’t understand why this surprises Spock so much, and doesn’t really think twice once he’s lost in the strange sensation of having another take control of what should be exclusively his. His will is pushed aside, and for a moment he fights the urge to seize it back. Then he sinks into his own mind, aware of all movement but detached. His facial muscles slip into a rigid but impassive expression.

_Is this how your face feels all the time? My god, that must hurt._

_{On the contrary, I find it relaxing.}_

“Jim?” His voice sounds strange without his accent. Flat, sharp around the edges, and wrong.

_Don’t turn me into a robot, Spock._

_{You are the one that suggested this, Doctor.}_

“Spock?” They’re both distracted by the vulnerability in Jim’s voice. They look over into Jim’s eyes, just in time to see all Jim’s shields lower and hope fill his face. Leo feels Spock soften and warm around him. Jim throws his arms around Leo’s body, murmuring, “Spock.”

Leo brings his arms up around Jim, tentatively, only getting Spock’s approval after the fact.

_{Doctor?}_

Shit, Leo hadn’t locked that part away well enough. A flare of longing had shot through his shields. Luckily Jim couldn’t feel him as well.

“I thought I lost you, Spock.”

“I am here, Jim, thanks to Doctor McCoy.”

“Bones did this?”

“I believe so.”

Jim smiles a soft smile. “Thanks, Bones.”

Something in Leo cracks, and he knows he’s going to regret everything for a very long time.

~

_{You have no control!}_

Leo’s fist still aches from where he punched the metallic wall of his room. He can see he hasn’t made a dent, and he can feel the skin of his knuckles burn, the bruises forming under the skin between it and the thin muscle covering his bones.

 _{You cannot calm yourself, so you resort to physical violence!}_ The thought is accompanied with an enormous sense of disgust, one that almost physically sickens Leo. Considering the history of Vulcan, Leo can understand. Doesn’t make it easier to swallow.

_{You are so open with your emotions! You let them rule your head and actions! You show them no respect! It is no wonder your sense are dulled. You don’t know how to feel, how to see how to hear, you are so very-}_

“Human.” Leo says aloud, and mentally the word is accompanied with a twist of hurt and resignation that Spock stops his rant and cannot find the energy to continue.

~

_{You could have been lovers once.}_

Leo has since calmed down and is now lying, listless, on his bed, flexing the hand with swollen knuckles over and over to refresh the pain. He’s too soul-weary to deny it.

{What stopped you?}

A flood of memories pulls them both under: little moments of contact and shared looks between him and Jim at the Academy, then how everything culminated into him bringing Jim with him on board the Enterprise. That was their greatest leap of faith for a single person since finding one another. That was the crucible for their relationship, the final test.

Except after, all there is Jim and Spock. Jim and Spock save a planet, Jim and Spock save each other, Jim and Spock on Nibiru, Jim and Spock go after Khan. And in the end, Jim only thanks Spock for saving his life. Slowly, Spock backs down, the weight of these implications falling heavy in his soul.

 _{Me.}_ He thinks quietly.

Leo mentally shakes his head, reversing the camera of memories, showing him watching them, drawing away, appearing less and less on the Bridge.

“No, Spock, me.” He says aloud.

_Because I was me, and because you were you._

_{I understand now.}_

Leo didn’t think he did, but the ache in his right hand had gone dull, re-exposing him to the void in his soul, and that just wouldn’t do.

~

Jim’s fingers dig into Leo’s arm when the Vulcan elders are done speaking, but Spock’s stoicism has (thankfully) taken over his face (their face, but it was his first).

"Bones." One word, but they have never needed more. Leo can hear, under the word, all the pleading and fear. "You don’t have to do this."

 _"Don’t take that risk."_ Leo translates when he feels Spock's curiousity spike.

Leo looks back. Spock doesn’t resist, nor does he speak. Leo can feel Spock’s guilt. _It wasn’t your fault._

Jim’s eyes dart frantically over Leo’s face. “They don’t know that this will work. You could die.”

Leo opens his mouth. He wants to point out there will always be a risk that he could die. Spock stops him. _{Jim is emotionally compromised. This will not ease his fear. In fact, it will likely increase his anger.}_ Leo closes his mouth, as they both can see the fear metabolizing into anger already, turning Jim’s wide eyes stormy.

"You know what, fine. If you want to risk your life in this idiotic ritual that we don’t know will even work, you just do that. But don’t expect me to be here to watch you die."

The pleading is there, hidden in a tremor between you and die. Leo notices, but Spock almost misses it. _{What does it mean?}_

 _"Don’t die, too."_ Leo translates for him, only to feel another wave of guilt. He sighs. “We’ll find you when it’s over.”

"Don’t." Jim’s voice is a warning and finality rolled in one. He turns heel and walks away, and both Spock’s and Leo’s heart reach after him. Spock recoils.

"Don’t start that now. I’m doing this for you." Leo murmurs. There’s a flash back, to dancing blue eyes and the equivalent of a Vulcan smile. Leo feels Spock’s heart warm, tinged with surprise that he held such a memory in him. Leo himself only feels numbness. His jealousy had dried up long ago.

 _{Jim loves you as well.}_ Spock whispers, and Leo feels the Vulcan is not yet beyond jealousy.

"It’s not the same."

_{It is.}_

"Keep that to yourself, Spock." _I don’t need another false hope._

Spock seems to understand, and is silent.

"Doctor?" Leo turns to see they have been joined by a Vulcan woman in elaborate robes of wispy material.

"We’re ready."

 _She’s young. {Abnormally so.}_ “Thanks.”

"Doctor?" The Vulcan woman tilts her head in confusion.

"I was talking to- well, not you, miss. Don’t worry. It’s a nervous habit." _{An unfortunate one at that.}_

 _I didn’t ask you, Spock._ He chides as they follow the elaborately dressed woman. She glances back a few times, her steps uneven.

_{She is nervous.}_

_Spock,_ Leo warns. His stomach is twisting in knots.

_{I apologize, Doctor. I often cannot help my observations.}_

_I know._

The girl leads them into a candle-lit chamber, strange symbols carefully carved into the floors and connected in geometric patterns. There are two polished stone slabs lain side by side, close enough for an arm to reach across and grab onto whoever is on the other slab, but far enough for someone to walk in between. On one rests Spock’s body, peaceful as if he were still asleep. The girl hesitates.

"Fal-tor-pan is a dangerous ritual for both the bearer and the soul, especially if one is not Vulcan…" She doesn’t finish the sentence.

_{How illogical.}_

_She’s a girl, Spock, let her be. {That may mean death for us both, Doctor.}_

_You’re letting your nerves get to you,_ Leo warns. He looks at the girl the way he would a surgeon in training before a lengthy operation. Her hands shake, but her spine is straight, and her gaze level. “I trust you.”

She blinks, perhaps as surprised as Spock feels, and her hands stop shaking. “Lie down, Doctor McCoy.”

~

_Extracting a soul is precise work, Leo learns through the bond with this girl (and she is a girl, to her own people and his, making her young indeed). When Spock died, he had not been thinking clearly. He had made quite a mess of inserting his soul into Leo’s._

_Still, this girl, T’lar, after he grandmother, was a sure touch. She claims, through the bond, she is borrowing Leo’s surgical skill. Spock had chosen wisely._

_Spock claims to know this. Leo knows better._

_Because Leo can feel it now, how Spock had fought death, fought hard so that a pair of deep blue eyes would smile again. To wipe away the fear that should never cloud that radiant face._

_Jim…_

_Leo fought, too. He fought so many times, to bring those blue eyes back from death. Jim seemed to be drawn to it, honestly. The way he looked as he was dying (a look Leo had seen far too often) was like a boy in love: longing._

_And maybe Leo had been so concerned with keeping Jim’s eyes off death, he forgot that another pair of eyes also watched death like a boy in love._

_I did not intend to die, Doctor. I had just found a reason to live._

_There is a flashback to a windy cave. It had been hurricane season, which in that godforsaken desert meant sandstorms. The sky and air a muddy, bloody color with fine disk-like granules that left tiny razor cuts in the dermis. Static electricity made the air taste like ozone and feel alive. Jim had burst out laughing five minutes in as Spock’s hair stood perfectly on end like a pin cushion and Leo’s became a mess of cowlicks._

_Jim wasn’t laughing ten minutes later when a sand creature drops from the sky and Spock pushes both him and Leo into a crevasse. Jim is clawing at Leo’s chest to get free, to help Spock, who is clearly losing this battle, but Leo saw the determination in Spock’s eyes, and knew from his glance at the tricorder readings on the things electrical signals that Jim’s human nervous wouldn’t stand a chance. Spock’s wouldn’t hold much better, but if it were a choice between Spock and all three…? So he bites the bullet and holds Jim down, and knew when Jim started sobbing in desperation that he would never be forgiven._

_Together like that they listen to Spock die._

_When the sandstorm peters out and all there is left to hear is Spock’s labored breathing, both scramble out of their cover. It takes Leo five seconds to determine the electrical burns are far too much, he can’t do anything._

_Jim must’ve read that off his face. Leo wishes he could say hatred was Jim’s next emotion, but all he saw was raw, infinite anguish, his entire expression twisting in grief. Jim cries like a child, and it breaks Leo’s heart._

_He doesn’t realize they’re both griping Spock’s hands until he’s shocked, and they go limp._

_{Spock joins in here. The shock was his katra. Spock was fighting, fighting to protect his brother, His lover, his friend. Fighting so the clouds will clear and the sun will shine. But he could not win this fight. He was going to die. Curiously, unlike his previous near-deaths, he did not want to go. Just as curiously, he felt it was no longer an option._

_There is one option._

_He can store his katra in a vessel. But it was dangerous, and a sacrifice of a loved one, something most would prefer death to._

_But Jim cries like a child, and that breaks Spock’s heart._

_Already he feels his katra pulling from his body. He can slip into death, or he can slip into one of the hands holding his… Which? Jim? Leonard would never…_

_But a warm soul draws him. One of love, and of heartbreak (Jim cries like a child, and that breaks their heart). The soul calls to him. **Fight, Spock. Come back. For Jim.** And so Spock’s katra listens, he fights, and slips next to the warm soul, which envelopes him like the Vulcan sun and lulls his tired katra into rest.}_

**_That is it. That is the moment of coalescence. You are now separate._ **

~

Leo feels a shock, and Spock is gone.

Strangely, this body built for one felt too large for only his soul. The two men blink and rise in tandem, their eyes searching each other out. Leo should no longer feel what Spock feels, yet when Spock’s eyes fill with guilt, Leo feels it as well, though it is muted, distant like a radio connection over miles, but still there.

Spock blinks. Confusion.

"I felt that." Leo says.

"Yes." Spock answers.

T’lar is unconscious. Moving her seemed polite enough, but they couldn’t stay, they had to find Jim. Leo kisses her forehead and mutters thanks, something Spock thinks is unnecessary, but is grateful for.

“We’d stay longer,” he explains, “but we can’t. There’s someone who needs us.”

**_Jim._ **

He was probably halfway across the galaxy by now, maybe on his way to Earth to burn every bridge between him and Starfleet and the memory of Spock and Leo.

_We have to find him._

(There is the memory of a flash of agony as Jim walks away, a tiny falter in his step, and the shaking line of his shoulders. Repressed sobs. Spock had almost missed them, but Leo had read it loud and clear, and it broke their hearts.)

~

Jim does not go back to Earth.

Jim throws himself into the black.

This is far worse than either of them anticipated. He doesn’t want to know anyone. He doesn’t want to risk death taking yet another.

But he is not dead himself.

 _{We must find him.}_ Spock thinks, curled into Leo’s chest.

 _I know._ Leo thinks back.

Neither of them acknowledge the bond. Neither of them think about how Spock’s katra had, in soul, pressed against Leo’s chest like they were now. Neither acknowledged what was growing between them. This was the same way Leo didn’t acknowledge they were hurtling through space in a thin metal box with a nuclear reactor a few feet away, or that his father’s voice still haunted his dreams. It was the same way Spock did not acknowledge he left home and could never return because it did not exist, or that his mother’s warm hand on his shoulder was not real and could never be real again.

They don’t acknowledge. They merely sleep, and worry.

**_Jim._ **


End file.
